by the El Reportero’s news services

Hugo Chávez

Venezuelans on Wednesday are mourning President Hugo Chávez, who died after a two-year battle with cancer, while government officials make preparations for his funeral and succession.

The armed forces fired a 21-gun salute to Chávez at 8:00 a.m. and announced that a cannon would be fired once an hour until the late president was buried on Friday.

The order for the continuous salute was given by Defense Minister Adm. Diego Molero, armed forces strategic command chief Gen. Wilmer Barrientos said.

“This is one of the top honors for a head of state,” the general told VTV.

The 58-year-old Chávez died on Tuesday after battling cancer for nearly two years.

Chávez’s death was announced by a tearful Vice President Nicolás Maduro, who will serve as interim president.

Elections will be held within 30 days and Maduro is expected to be the candidate of the governing Venezuelan United Socialist Party.

The Venezuelan leader’s death made headlines around the world and his funeral is expected to be attended by several world leaders.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and Bolivian President Evo Morales have already arrived in Caracas, while other leaders are expected to arrive on Thursday, Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said Wednesday. Chávez had undergone four operations, as well as courses of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, since first being diagnosed with cancer in June 2011.

The socialist president spent more than two months in Cuba due to complications that followed his Dec. 11 cancer surgery in Havana.

Government officials make preparations for his funeral and succession.

The armed forces fired a 21-gun salute to Chavez at 8:00 a.m. and announced that a cannon would be fired once an hour until the late president was buried on Friday.

Latin America vows to protect sharks and fight Asian interests

Latin America adopted a nearly unanimous position Wednesday at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, meeting in Bangkok to protect sharks, putting its weight behind a proposal that the Asian bloc considers unacceptable. Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Honduras took the lead in advancing the shark-protection position, which is backed by the European Union and the United States.

Advocates of shark protection want to regulate captures and the trade in whitetip reef sharks, hammerhead sharks, sardine sharks and stingrays.

The proposals won the near unanimous support of the regional bloc formed by South America, Central America and the Caribbean at a previous CITES meeting.

The Latin American bloc wants sharks included in Appendix 2 of CITES, which regulates captures, to avoid endangering the animals’ populations.

Mexican priest activist criticizes police focus on migrants

The Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, who is known for his work with Central American migrants, said during a conference in Mexico City that he was concerned about the government’s increasing emphasis on policing in its immigration policy.

Officials have been turning the National Migration Institute, or INM, into more of a police agency, Solalinde said at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

The Catholic priest, who founded the Hermanos del Camino shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca, was forced to leave Mexico for a short time last year after receiving threats.

“Sometimes there are few migrants and up to 80 armed (Federal Police) officers, who get involved in everything” at the INM station in Acayucan, Veracruz, the priest said.

(Hispanically Speaking News contributed to this report).

by Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com

Scientific publication envisions “a strategic multilateral implementation (of planetary scale geoengineering) through an exclusive ‘club’ that increases benefits to members at the expense of those excluded.”

In a recent publication published by Environmental Research Letters, three scientists have published the results of a computer simulation “game”, probing several scenario’s on how to best organize a “unilateral implementation scheme” of global geoengineering.

“(…) a sufficiently powerful international coalition might be able to deploy solar geoengineering. Here, we show that regional differences in climate outcomes create strategic incentives to form coalitions that are as small as possible, while still powerful enough to deploy solar geoengineering.”

Defining geoengineering as “intentionally reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface through the use of stratospheric aerosols”, the authors used climate models (such as the ones used by the IPCC) as the basis for their “gaming” activities- which they describe as “global thermostat setting game”:

“The characteristics of coalitions to geoengineer climate are modeled using a ‘global thermostat setting game’ based on climate model results. Coalition members have incentives to exclude non-members that would prevent implementation of solar geoengineering at a level that is optimal for the existing coalition.”, authors Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira point out.

Under “rules and assumptions” the authors explain that “the game takes place in two stages.”

“During the first stage players choose their memberships and the winning coalition is formed. In the second stage, the winning coalition acts as a single actor to maximize the benefits of geoengineering to all coalition members. Players outside the coalition do not make decisions in this second stage.”

From the assertion that man made climate change will have different results from region to region, the scientists involved in this modeling business factored these differences into their “global thermostat setting game”, as a result of which researched different international coalitions that would be most likely to succeed in starting and maintaining a global geoengineering effort:

“(…) If a decision were made somehow to move ahead with the deployment of an intentionally introduced stratospheric aerosol layer, some regions might prefer a cooling or warming relative to the current climate, creating complicated problems in setting the global thermostat. In addition, several modeling studies have demonstrated that if solar geoengineering is used to compensate for rising greenhouse-gas concentrations and is then stopped abruptly, very rapid warming can occur. Thus, if solar geoengineering is ever implemented, stopping suddenly poses a threat.”

From this assertion follows a draconian consequence, namely that only a sustained geongineering effort of the earth’s atmosphere on the part of an international coalition can do the job. The premise of the paper, supported by their computer simulations, is that an “exclusive club” of nations taking the rein, would be the best way to sustain such a spraying campaign for a sufficient period of time:

“a strategic multilateral implementation through an exclusive ‘club’ that increases benefits to members at the expense of those excluded. If the option of a global coalition is accounted for in formulating a system of intracoalitional transfers, the game presented here always produces a stable and powerful coalition in which all coalition members benefit from excluding other parties.”

The rational behind this seemingly contradictory statement reads as follows:

“Under an exclusive coalitions model of international agreements to geoengineer, if one coalition breaks down, another is ready and eager to take its place. As the potential harm from termination grows (i.e., as the amount of greenhouse-gas forcings being compensated for with geoengineering increases), so too do the incentives to avoid this termination among all potential coalitions.”

That the geoengineering efforts by this exclusive club are a thing of the long haul is evident from the authors’ assertion that “if the coalition so decides, solar geoengineering can be implemented starting in 2015 and negotiations among club members only will determine the setting of the global thermostat for the next ten years. In each subsequent decade, negotiations begin anew, and determine a new thermostat setting for the next ten years.”

After the publication lists the outcomes of their gaming models, they conclude by stating that the “exclusive club” scenario, as opposed to an inclusive one, turns out to be the desired way to move forward:

“(…) the results of our game simulations show the maximum achievable benefits regions can gain by acting strategically to form exclusive clubs; this necessarily imposes damages on non-members relative to their preferences”.

The outcomes of this publication are inherently draconian, especially if we take into account the fact that the World Economic Forum in its latest Global Risks report warned that a “rogue nation” or individual could “hijack” global climate change for nefarious purposes. The report mentions several possible scenario’s, or X-factors, which could occur in the coming year, among which (page 57) a geoengineering nightmare, according to the report, “in which a country or small group of countries precipitates an international crisis by moving ahead with deployment or large-scale research independent of the global community. The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked by a rogue country or even a wealthy individual, with unpredictable costs to agriculture, infrastructure and global stability.”

This is an ironical confusion like only top globalist factions can produce. Where the World Economic Forum warns us about possible “rogue” parties moving ahead with planetary-wide geoengineering schemes, another group of globalist-funded scientists suggest an “exclusive club” shoud take the reins over global spraying efforts to “offset global warming”.

In the WEF-report we get the impression that the “rogue” parties described are parties that have not or will not sign onto global agreements presided over by the UN. This, according to the report, “leaves a gap for unregulated experimentation.”

“For example”, the report states “an island state threatened with rising sea levels may decide they have nothing to lose, or a well funded individual with good intentions may take matters into their own hands. There are signs that this is already starting to occur.”

“Recent studies”, the report goes on to state, “suggest that a small fleet of aircraft could inject a million tonnes of sulphur compounds into the stratosphere – enough to offset roughly half of the global warming experienced to date – for US$1-2 billion annually.”

According to environmental writer Clive Hamilton in a 2010 article for the Guardian “a powerful coalition of forces is quietly constellating around the idea of transforming the Earth’s atmosphere by simulating volcanic eruptions to counter the warming effects of carbon pollution. Engineering the planet’s climate system is attracting the attention of scientists, scientific societies, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed — nothing less than taking control of Earth’s climate system — the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning”.

In the context of the recent modeling tables published in Environmental Research Letters, these words by Hamilton (himself a believer in man-made climate change) have been taken account before they commenced with their “global thermostat setting game”. Hamilton wrote in 2010:

“If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in Beijing. Or the government of an Australia crippled by permanent drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires could risk the wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project”.

Apart from the fact that any planetary scale geoengineering effort would be incomprehensibly irresponsible- and apart from the fact that anthropogenic global warming is in essence a pseudo-science- the fact that scientists are now envisioning an elite club of nations taking the reins in global geoengineering should make the alarm-bells go off all over the place.

Jurriaan Maessen’s website is Explosivereports.com.

by Ethan A. Huff
Natural News

A second Minnesota teenager has reportedly died from complications of infection with influenza Type A during this current flu season, prompting health officials across the state to urge the public to get flu shots for their own protection. But missing from many of the news reports on this tragedy is the fact that the child in question, 14-year-old Carly Christenson, had already been vaccinated for influenza before flu season even started, proving the utter failure of flu shots to protect against the flu.

As reported by CBS 4 News in Minnesota, young Carly passed away on January 8, 2013, not long after she was admitted to urgent care with a bad sore throat. Believing the symptoms to stem from a mild infection, doctors at the response center gave Carly a prescription for Prednisone, a powerful steroid drug used to treat inflammation, and sent her on her way. But by the next morning, things for Carly took a serious turn for the worse.

According to reports, Carly’s sore throat evolved into a serious fever that included shortness of breath and wheezing. Her lungs filled with fluid not long after that, and she had to be rushed to the hospital to have a heart and lung bypass with an ACMO machine. In the days that followed, Carly was given regular blood transfusions, but these were ultimately not enough — she died just a few days later.

Misplaced faith in the flu shot On the first day when Carly was admitted to urgent care, both her parents and the doctors at the clinic were reportedly not all that concerned about the child’s mild throat infection, as she had reportedly already been vaccinated for the flu back in August.

The fact that Carly had gotten a flu shot, in other words, was seen by Carly’s family and her doctors as a shield of protection for the girl — after all, authorities would not recommend flu shots if they did not actually work, right?

This misplaced faith in flu shots ultimately provided a false hope for Carly’s  family that she would be protected against the flu, a faith that was ultimately shattered by the reality of the complete ineffectiveness of the flu shot. Immediately after Carly’s death, authorities actually tried to deny that Carly died from the flu, referring to her condition as “flu-like.”

The head of the Minnesota Health Department, Kris Ehresmann, even went so far as to claim that she “could not confirm” that Carly had ever even had a flu shot, even though other sources had already confirmed that she had, indeed, gotten the shot.

Still others have since tried to reassure the public that flu shots still work, and that Carly’s death is some kind of medical anomaly.

But the science speaks for itself — in a best case scenario, flu shots provide protection for only about 1.5 out of every 100 people.

The other 98.5 people who get flu shots are needlessly exposed to toxic adjuvants and viral materials that could cause them to develop the flu, or worse.

Consider the case of seven-year-old Kaylynne Matten of Vermont as evidence of the dangers of the flu shot. As reported by investigative journalist Christina England over at Vactruth.com, young Kaylynne died last year in her mother’s arms just four days after receiving a flu shot at an annual checkup.

According to Kaylynne’s parents, the young girl, who had no pre-existing health conditions and was a very healthy child, developed a serious headache and fever the day after getting her flu shot. Three days later, Kaylynne suddenly stopped breathing and died without warning in her mother’s arms.